This final report describes the Economic Strengthening to Keep and Reintegrate Children into Families (ESFAM) project and presents findings from an evaluation of the program, including its implementation and outcomes as well as its impacts. 

This video presents the work of the FARE family strengthening program in Uganda to prevent separation of families and reintegrate children who are separated from their families, including the story of one young person and his family who were impacted by the program.

This snapshot summarises the findings from the responses of 474 16-25 year old care leavers who completed the Your Life Beyond Care (YLBC) survey in 6 local authorities in England - an overall response rate of 30%. This snapshot gives an insight into how care leavers really feel about their lives.

This report from the German Youth Institute (Deutsches Jugendinstitut e.V., DJI) assesses the adoption system in the Netherlands.

This mixed method study explores the postsecondary experiences of foster alumni in a large southwest urban area of the US.

This article argues that the US state of Alaska should enact a state statute to provide clear guidance to state child welfare practitioners and state courts that Alaska’s state government recognizes an Indian custodianship created through Tribal law or custom as a pathway for Indian children to exit the overburdened state foster care system.

This chapter from the boom Child Justice Administration in Africa examines the development of the child justice system in South Africa. The empirical findings in this book revealed the models put in place for alternative care of children in need of care and protection, which the author believes were hindered by inadequate budgetary allocations and could have been recorded in the administration of child justice in South Africa.

This study extends the research on the experiences and outcomes of siblings in care by comprehensively mapping sibling networks both within and outside the care system and measuring sibling estrangement (living apart and lack of contact) over time among children in Scotland.

This open access article explores three related phenomena: first, the abandonment and institutionalization of children with disabilities in China that increased disproportionately in the 2000s; second, the important relationships between such abandonments, culture, economics, and politics in contemporary China; and third, the relationship between such abandonments, the increasing rates at which Chinese orphans with disabilities are being adopted to Western countries through Inter-country Adoption (ICA), and the global politics of ICA and disability.

The aim of this study is to compare the subjective well-being (SWB) of children hosted in institutions and in foster families with the well-being of children living with their families. Results indicate that children in residential care have a lower SWB in all variables compared to foster care and general populations groups.

In this article, the authors present findings from a follow‐up assessment from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) - the first longitudinal study to investigate the neurodevelopment of institutionalized infants randomized to a foster care (FCG) intervention versus care as usual (CAUG)- of brain electrical activity as indexed by resting EEG at age 16 years.

This article uses a content analysis methodology to critically examine and compare the findings of six recent Australian child protection inquiries (five at state and territory level and one Commonwealth) in relation to their discrete sections on leaving care.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families funded Partnerships to Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Supportive Housing for Families in the Child Welfare System, a five-year, $25 million demonstration that provided supportive housing to families in the child welfare system, in five sites. This report summarizes the results of the cost study, which estimates the costs of the housing and services offered in the demonstration and any savings, or additional costs, resulting from the demonstration’s effects on families’ use of homeless programs and child welfare services.

The VACS are designed to measure the prevalence, past 12-month incidence and circumstances surrounding sexual, physical and emotional violence in childhood, adolescence (before age 18) and young adulthood (before age 24).

The Lesotho VACS Fact Sheet provides country-specific data on sexual and physical violence against children in Lesotho.

This Training Manual seeks to raise awareness of the content of the Prepare for Leaving Care: Practice Guidance, build knowledge and skills to support young people through the process of leaving care and help trainees to understand and develop some of the tools which are helpful in the leaving care process.

There have long been doubts within social work about the viability of reconciling participatory practice with the statutory power that comes hand-in-hand with child protection work. This book explores this issue by proposing an original theory of children’s participation within statutory child protection interventions. It prioritises children’s voices through presentation of a wide collection of children’s experiences of the UK child protection system including three unique in-depth accounts.

This study prospectively examined risk factors of first time delinquency for maltreated youth between ages 9 and 14.

To support innovation in addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the authors have undertaken a review of evidence on common approaches to prevent ACEs and/or mitigate their negative impacts in Wales.

In a sample of 136 Romanian children from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), who were exposed to early psychosocial deprivation in the form of institutional care, the authors of this study examined caregiver-reported and observer-rated signs of disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED).

This paper describes two successful models in which African American families both self-recruited, and were recruited by agencies seeking to place African American children.

This open access paper reports on experiences and reflections of a group of children and young people and academic researchers who developed a Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group that was set up in the context of an ongoing health service intervention trial with Looked after children and care leavers (denoted as LAC).

This paper asks how state parental responsibility towards unaccompanied minors is given meaning, and with what consequences, for both frontline workers and unaccompanied minors alike?

This paper discusses critical tasks facing adoptive parents of transracially adopted persons (TRAs), what we know about parents’ role and children’s outcomes.

When children are adopted from the care system staying in touch with members of their birth families must be considered.This research paper draws on the English experience.

This study examined the possible differences in educational level by comparing Finnish national register data for 814 former reform school (RS) residents in four cohorts (placed in out-of-home care in 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006) to 4021 of their peers in the general population matched by gender, age, and place of birth.

This report provides findings from the Urban Institute's impact analysis of a program that provided supportive housing to families in the child welfare system in the US.

This podcast episode describes what self-harm is and how social workers can support young people and carers who are self-harming.

In commemoration of its founding 100 years ago, Save the Children is releasing its third annual Global Childhood Report to celebrate progress for children.

This fact sheet presents an overview of the data found in El Salvador’s Violence Against Children Survey.

Esta página de datos presente un resumen de los datos encontrados en la Encuesta de Violencia Contra los Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes de El Salvador

El siguiente resumen resalta los hallazgos principales de la Encuesta de Violencia contra Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes (EVCNNA), El Salvador 2017.

El siguiente resumen resalta los hallazgos principales de la Encuesta de Violencia contra Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes (EVCNNA) Honduras 2017.

Esta página de datos presente un resumen de los datos encontrados en la Encuesta de Violencia Contra los Niños, Niñas y Adolscentes de Honduras.

This fact sheet presents an overview of the data found in Honduras’s Violence Against Children Survey.

This briefing paper reports on the lessons learnt from a process evaluation of the child protection component of the Global Fund’s Young Women and Girls (YWG) programme, a multi-pronged HIV prevention programme targeting young women and girls implemented in 10 districts in South Africa.

This scoping review was undertaken to map survey methodologies for violence against children (VAC) measurement in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries and to identify key considerations for developing both methodologically sound and culturally appropriate VAC surveys in Indonesia and similar contexts.

By age 16 the attainment of most children in or on the edge of out of home care has fallen well behind the average for their age. This paper uses the English National Pupil Database to examine how much of this falling behind occurs before the age 7, and how any subsequent decline relates to time in care as against time outside it.

This three-paper dissertation examines the overrepresentation of Black children reported to child protection services in Canada.

Despite the importance of training residential youth care professionals to increase their professional competences, little attention has been paid so far to the influence of training on the behaviour and skills of residential professionals. This study aims to gain greater insight into the effects of training on the skills of these professionals.

The article examines from a comparative perspective how Sweden and Germany reacted to the unprecedented increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in 2015. By illustrating the reactions of two countries, the study shows that an unprecedented wave of refugees/asylum seekers can trigger both more incremental, adaptive and drastic transformative policy changes.

Using a phenomenological approach, this qualitative study explores the contexts of institutional placement of children in Azerbaijan from their caregivers' perspectives.

This report from Comhlámh and the Volunteering and Orphanages Working Group (OWG) explores the negative impacts of institutionalization on children and the negative impacts of volunteering in orphanages, including the proliferation of orphanages and perpetuation of family separation to satisfy volunteer demands, highlighting recommendations for addressing this issue.

This presentation provides an overview of care-leaving research in South Africa.

This report presents the findings of a global survey designed to map current implementation of Inclusive Early Childhood Development (IECD) and Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) programs, among other objectives, and outlines recommendations based on those findings.

This paper considers the importance of material objects for looked after and adopted children integrated as part of life story work practices.

The aim of the article was the analysis of the problem of speech development in care and educational institutions and family-run children’s houses in Poland.

In this study, the authors analyzed the literature on foster care in Poland and conducted a narrative questionnaire with an educator who simultaneously holds the responsibility for teaching youth in foster care autonomy in order to identify factors that affect educational and vocational plans that foster care charges have.

Drawing on the extant literature, this chapter will present a multileveled discussion of the experiences of prejudice and bias foster youth face, with a focus on the systemic inequities among diverse youth in foster care, the individual challenges youth with different social identities face, socialization processes that can support these youth, and challenges foster parents face in supporting foster youths’ healthy identity development.

The aim of this study was to ask youth themselves how they experience the impact of traumas prior to living in a foster family.